Effect of quantum well number on nonlinear refraction in semiconductor laser amplifiers biased at transparency

To be able to exploit these effects in a device, and hence to be able to evaluate its performance, we wish to understand the implications of the choice of device construction on the size of nonlinearity as well as other parameters such as background loss which will limit its performance. We therefore present in this paper the results of experiments on a series of devices with various numbers of quantum wells as well as bulk active regions. >